Economic Rents, the Demand for Capital, and Financial Structure

Working Paper 91-8
by Richard W. Kopcke
1991 Series

The correspondence between the demand for capital and various measures of the return on assets, the cost of capital, and Tobin’s q often is tenuous (Abel and Blanchard 1986; Hayashi 1982), at times even perverse. Of a variety of possible explanations, this paper considers the consequences of allowing for declining returns to capital--a declining marginal efficiency of capital schedule (MEC). This modification not only relaxes the connection between the demand for capital and many of its traditional determinants, but it also may introduce a connection among the value of the firm, its financial structure, and its stock of assets.

PDF version of paper PDF